Poetry Fall 2013 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Chris Joyner
Wrestlemania III
& other poems
Carey Russell
Visiting Hours
& other poems
Marc Pietrzykowski
Cabinet of Wonders
& other poems
Jonathan Travelstead
Prayer of the K-12
& other poems
Jennifer Lowers Warren
Our Daughter's Skin
& other poems
Jeff Burt
The Mapmaker's Legend
& other poems
Patricia Percival
Giving in to What If
& other poems
Toni Hanner
1960—Lanny
& other poems
Christopher Dulaney
Uncle
& other poems
Suzanne Burns
Window Shopping
& other poems
Katherine Smith
Mountain Lion
& other poems
Peter Kent
Surliness in the Green Mountains
& other poems
William Doreski
Gathering Sea Lavender
& other poems
Huso Liszt
Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin...
& other poems
Clifford Hill
How natural you are
& other poems
R. G. Evans
Dungeoness
& other poems
David Kann
Dead Reckoning
& other poems
Ricky Ray
The Music of As Is
& other poems
Tori Jane Quante
Creatio ex Materia
& other poems
G. L. Morrison
Baba Yaga
& other poems
Joe Freeman
In a Wood
& other poems
George Longenecker
Bear Lake
& other poems
Benjamin Dombroski
South of Paris
& other poems
Ryan Kerr
Pulp
& other poems
Josh Flaccavento
Glen Canyon Dam
& other poems
& other poems
Christine Stroud
Grandmother
& other poems
Abraham Moore
Inadvertent Landscape
& other poems
Chris Haug
Cow with Parasol
& other poems
Mariah Blankenship
Fiberglass Madonna
& other poems
Emily Hyland
The Hit
& other poems
Sam Pittman
Growth Memory
& other poems
Alex Linden
The Blues of In-Between
& other poems
Bobby Lynn Taylor
Lift
& other poems
D. Ellis Phelps
Five Poems
Alia Neaton
Cosmogony I
& other poems
Elisa Albo
Each Day More
& other poems
Noah B. Salamon
Sanctuary
& other poems
Mountain Lion
Nothing human’s in that sky,
like a room where guests aren’t welcome
no radio towers or electric wires,
and even the planes fly parallel to highway eighty-one
fifty miles to the west or turn east
north of here and fly to Richmond.
Just a few hawks circle the blue.
She eats a bite of the apple she took with her
and walks the gravel road to the ridge,
brushes her hair from her face and smiles
a habit like the sympathy she offers the mountain.
If she’s quiet she’ll see the deer in the undergrowth,
and once she saw a brown bear and cubs.
These hours when there’s no one to civilize her,
to put her in the proper perspective
she often imagines what she might say to the mountain,
how she’d advise it not to take too personally,
the dynamite and the quarry,
how she’d point to the example of the bear,
dung bright with purple berries,
its misunderstood subjectivity; to the deer’s
flighty point of view; to the wild wheat
harvested from the hillside,
its ingratitude at being found;
to the scrub pine that has taken root
while she was gone all autumn, green needles
bright with toxic gasses sucked from the wide blue sky.
But she knows if the mountain could
it wouldn’t offer brilliant arguments
but lift itself from golden haunches and leap.
Navel Orange
Audrey hates to bring in the groceries,
to struggle in through the side door, arms full
after the ease of plucking food like costumes
from a rich wardrobe: crushed velvet of coffee beans,
chains of barley, couscous, wheat-berries, grains
of edible gold. She harvests from the aisles
the silks of ruby red chard, of collard greens.
But then she has to get it all home.
It is—like the friends and lovers
with whom she once packed her mind,
their ruffled shadows, satin mysteries
all there for the choosing—too gorgeous.
No one told her of the difficulties of storage.
Once home the paper grocery bags, dampened,
split open, spilling fruit. Ripe cantaloupe
with its fragrance of sugar and garbage,
the lover with his belly, his suits, his job
at the financial corporation, a marriage
that haunted him, and four sweet children.
The voluminous sugars had to fit
somewhere. Only like the melon
they didn’t. It has taken years to decipher,
to learn to steadily unpack
the navel oranges exactly as they sit
on the table, to draw the precise distance
between the two pieces of citrus,
how light catches the pebbled flesh,
the flecks of shadow that fall
into miniscule valleys, the lamplight
that dazzles one pole of fruit bursting
with miniature oranges tucked into the globe
of larger fruit, the midnight that darkens the other.
Bridge
In her dream her son is dead.
Candy cannot call his name
as she once did when,
four, he opened the iron gate
at the park in Paris, careened down the hill
past the waffle seller and the black swan
toward the boulevard, cafes, gleaming cars.
That was before she learned the names
of machines she can now forget: Renault,
Audi, Toyota Chevrolet, GM, Volvo.
She can forget the spelling rules,
the multiplication tables, the names
and dates of all the presidents of the USA,
the names of girls.
None of them will do any good.
And then it is morning.
He is twenty-one. Candy doesn’t know
where he is, not exactly
though certainly he is in America,
probably in a car, and she—
surrounded by fog rising from the pines trees,
from the hemlock, from the James river,
from the Shenandoah mountains—
taking her coffee down to the water
hears a single engine in the distance.
One rusty pick-up truck approaches
with farm tags on the gravel road.
A hand flies up and waves to her
and moves past her where she stands on the bridge
in the only location she knows for sure.
Expedition
Audrey shuts the book on Shackleton,
the photos of his men: playing soccer in snow,
the Endurance foundered in blocks of ice
beyond them; gathered around the fire
on Elephant Island, their weathered faces
lit with wonder as they listen to stories
waiting for the rescue team;
petting the stripped tabby cat
that Shackleton finally shot
after calling it a weakling.
She would have been the cat
Audrey thinks worrying about the daughter
she raised alone, who careens
on the slick back roads of America
in her Japanese car. She rises from the couch
throws aside the weight of quilts
to choose the spices from the carousel
on the dining room table, soothed by
the tiny achievement of the small
wooden spoon in its bowl of salt,
the four ounce canister of tandoori spice,
glass bottles of whole black peppercorns,
cinnamon, nutmeg. She stands at the center
of a rag rug woven into a labyrinth of sienna,
green and blue, boiling the collard greens,
soy paste and tofu. Her daughter sings hello
as she arrives, elegant and oblivious,
from the storm, pets the purring tabby
that sleeps at the head of the table.
Satisfaction
Not forgetting of course rising from the body that once thrilled you
with the same delight you now recognize in golden retrievers
chasing Frisbees
or calves born at the penultimate day of spring frisking in pastures
carpeted with blue violets, lime colored grasses, dandelions like helium balloons.
Glittering space shuttles land safely in limpid blue oceans like transparent silks.
The heroic astronauts resume the paperwork of their everyday lives
to a tedious fanfare. The golden puppy now sleeps half the day.
The toddler bites into the velvety pink Easter egg to discover salt.
Friendships once fields of sweet clover, gone stale,
weigh down your body like moldy hay bales left in the rain.
What do you do with entire continents of disappointment
once exhausted by the early rages?
John Cage said if something is boring for five minutes
do it for ten, if boring for ten do it for twenty, if it is boring
for twenty,
do it an hour, and so on for eternity. I think he had an answer
to cherry blossoms after the spectacular show and the
heartrending petal fall.
Katherine Smith
’s poems and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, among them Unsplendid, Measure, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Ploughshares, The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage. Her first book, Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House), appeared in 2003. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.